In my
last blog on the topic of Low Code, I discussed, in my opinion, the motivation behind Low Code is not just about making it easy to build applications, but more about the need for speed to react to new business requirements in days or weeks rather than months.
In this blog, I want to focus on our Business Automation Studio environment - our one-stop integrated development environment for building and composing business automation - whether it is workflow, decisions, document processing or business applications. To help put the different automations together, we introduced an important concept - Automation Services. With Automation Services, we standardized on the notation of a reusable service. An Automation Service is more than just an API specification (we make use of OpenAPI v3), it is also an end-to-end experience to create, publish, discover, bind to services that are created with our automation technology or external services API. This approach greatly simplifies some of the technical aspects (e.g. such as understanding the OpenAPI specification, taking care of credentials, runtime endpoint resolution depending on environment) and allows Low-Code automation developers to focus on building the business logic, as opposed to having to understand the underlying technical concepts.
To demonstrate how easy it is now to create a new business application by making use of reusable Automation Services - I have prepared a simple video demo. In this 6 min video, I showed the building of a simple job quote application for a flooring company with the help of a Decisions automation service to calculate the quote, and a Workflow automation service to schedule the job appointment. A real-life application would be more sophisticated and will take more than 6 min to build, but I hope this is enough to convince you about the simplicity of our experience and at the same time the flexibility and power of our Low Code / No Code approach.
For those who are interested to learn about about Automation Services, see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-biz-automation/21.0.x?topic=building-automation-services for a more detailed discussion.
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